How an Unlikely Hollywood Juggernaut Came to Rule Netflix

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The streets of downtown Austin are stirring blearily to life as the turducken street taco that is SXSW—a weeklong tech expo wrapped inside a film festival and finished off with a music showcase—shakes off the previous night's revelry. But backstage at the Austin Convention Center, where he is due to deliver the film festival's keynote address, director-producer-writer-actor Mark Duplass is rested and alert. His father is here, and so is his agent, and so is a tray of pastries, which Mark eyes warily.

Mark is a 38-year-old former athlete—he ran track in high school—and he possesses that strain of shticky carb anxiety common to the contemporary middle-aged male. His Twitter bio reads, “Resisting donuts, daily.” On December 18 he tweeted, “I want a donut so goddamn bad my heart hurts.” Tomorrow he will give an interview to Salon in which he refers to them as a source of “extreme joy” followed by intense regret: “With years of therapy, we've been able to extend that doughnut joy from the 12 seconds of eating to another three minutes before the shame.” The point is, Mark is used to regulating his impulses for his own protection, and that's why he eschewed yesterday's industry parties and screenings in favor of a couple of miles on the treadmill and eight hours of sleep and why now, while the rest of the city struggles to rouse itself, he is full of energy and ready to take the stage.

Judging purely by his résumé, Mark is a fitting keynote speaker for SXSW's maximalism. As an actor, he has securely attained oh-hey-*that-*guy status. You might recognize him as the smirky Pete from FXX's fantasy-football comedy series The League or the competitively sensitive midwife Brendan on Fox's The Mindy Project or the tightly wound, undersexed Brett in HBO's Togetherness. But to the people filing into the auditorium, he is better known as one half of the Duplass brothers, an indie-film juggernaut that has written, directed, or had a hand in producing 24 movies over the past 19 years—including four new films screening at this very festival—not to mention Togetherness, every episode of which they wrote, produced, and directed. Beyond their prodigious output, Mark and his brother, Jay, 42, are celebrated for creating an entirely new model of DIY filmmaking, one tailor-made for the Netflix era of digital distribution. Twenty years ago every young director dreamed of becoming the next Quentin Tarantino. Today they all want to be a Duplass brother.

“They are singularly the most informed and instinctive filmmakers and businessmen in the industry,” says Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer. “They know how to get a film made, and they know how to get it seen.”

Jay (left) and Mark Duplass are famous for reverse-engineering a movie to fit the available props, scenery, and actors. Brent Humphreys

The Duplass brothers' movies tend toward finely wrought portrayals of human frailty, but Mark takes the stage with preternatural confidence, his name projected in giant letters behind him like Charles Foster Kane's at a political rally, his shirtsleeves rolled up and ready for business. In interviews, Mark comes across as a Guy Who Has All the Answers, so it's not unreasonable to expect that he will have some advice for young filmmakers looking to storm the studio system. As he begins his talk, though, his hands press against the sides of the podium and his eyes take on the kind-but-firm look of a parent telling his children the truth about the Easter Bunny: It ain't happening.

“If you're at all like me and you read the trades and are involved in film conversations, it's mostly bad news,” Mark begins. “What we hear about is the death of the middle class of independent films. Where are those cool $5 million movies that used to break out of Sundance in 1998? Why are they not buying those or making those, or even when they do, why are they not promoting them, and why is nobody going to see them?” This brings Mark to his thesis: No deep-pocketed studio executive is going to ride to your rescue. “The cavalry is not coming.”

Then again, enterprising filmmakers are no longer confined to the conventional studio system. By now it's obvious that platforms like HBO and Netflix have made TV a destination for ambitious, big-budget projects like Game of Thrones and House of Cards. What's less remarked upon is that they have also provided an alternate economy for the kinds of scrappy passion projects that once filled art house cinemas. These digital platforms hew to different business models than the open-huge-or-go-home traditional movie industry. HBO judges success not just by the number of viewers a show receives but by its cultural impact. Amazon favors shows that draw a small but dedicated audience instead of a broad but less passionate viewership. And Netflix bases its acquisition offers on the projected size of a property's audience. After all, it's fine to draw only a tenth of the audience of The Avengers, as long as your film cost only a tenth as much.

And nobody has taken advantage of those new business models like the Duplasses. They're proponents of what they call the “available-materials school of filmmaking,” a bare-bones philosophy of reverse-engineering a movie to fit the scenery, props, and actors at their disposal. (They wrote their first completed feature film, a road movie called The Puffy Chair, around the fact that they had a spare van and a deal on some matching recliners.) They also keep salaries low—in the early days, $100 a day was common—in favor of doling out percentages of the eventual gross. It also helps that they edit footage on laptops, allowing them to often keep production costs under $1 million. (One Duplass brothers production, Sean Baker's Tangerine, was shot entirely on an iPhone 5s.)

The failure left the Duplasses with no money, no prospects, and a harrowing lack of faith in their filmmaking abilities.

That's why if you've seen the movies they've written, directed, or produced—including The One I Love, a couples-therapy session by way of Borges; Safety Not Guaranteed, a time-travel romcom; The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, in which two adult brothers work out their disappointments and frustrations through a series of adolescent sporting events; and even inexpensive studio films like Cyrus, an Oedipal love triangle starring Jonah Hill, or the Jason Segel-led Jeff, Who Lives at Home, about a guy looking for wood glue and the meaning of life—it was most likely on your couch, which is really a perfectly appropriate venue for such intimate fare. We tend to think of technology in Hollywood as a way of raising the stakes: higher budgets, bigger explosions, sassier robots. But in this case, technology has helped the Duplasses aggressively lower the stakes, carving out a healthy career making small films on paltry budgets for relatively small audiences.

“Not all movies are movies you want to spend $14 on—and not all movies are movies you want to spend $10 on for ultra VOD, or even $6.99 on renting,” Mark tells me later that evening, at a Duplass Brothers Productions party that he will duck out of before midnight. “The One I Love came out in theaters for the enthusiasts and did a chunk of business on VOD. But when it started streaming on Netflix, it exploded. Same thing with Safety Not Guaranteed. I'm kind of homing in on this model.”

Maintaining a vision this modest requires constant vigilance. Hollywood has a history of taking promising young auteurs, throwing enormous budgets at them, punishing them when their films inevitably fail to earn out—and turning them into megalomaniacs along the way. It's hard to imagine *Apocalypse Now-*era Francis Ford Coppola resisting many doughnuts, metaphorical or literal.

But by continuously policing their ambitions, the Duplasses have been able to build an entire ecosystem for making the kinds of character-driven dramedies that the industry has all but abandoned. Mark concludes his keynote by reiterating his admonition to ignore the false lure of Hollywood success. Take it from him: Even if you become an indie-cinema celebrity with dozens of films and a successful HBO series under your belt, the cavalry is not coming. But then he gets to the kicker.

“The good news is, who gives a fuck about the cavalry?” he says. “Because now you are the cavalry.”

A couple of months after SXSW, I meet with Mark and Jay for breakfast at LA's Chateau Marmont. I won't bother to describe the restaurant because you've probably already read about it in 100 other Hollywood profiles, but I will tell you that the concordance-seeking journalist in me is tickled to realize that its address on Sunset Boulevard probably places it not too far up the road from where Norma Desmond voiced her famous lament: “I am big, it's the pictures that got small.”

The Duplasses roll in around 9:30 am, exhausted and overwhelmed. It turns out that they've been in Detroit, filming for an undisclosed project. They had gone to bed around 6 the previous morning, then woke up a few hours later so they could fly home in time to put their kids to bed. Their body clocks were all screwed up, so they hadn't slept much, despite the fact that Jay had self-medicated with Benadryl.

Mark, who carries himself with the ease of someone used to being on camera, is able to hide his fatigue behind a kind of reflexive gregariousness. Jay, the more guarded and also more bearded Duplass, only recently became publicly recognizable, thanks to his role as damaged lothario Josh in the Golden Globe-winning Amazon series Transparent. (He also played a midwife—brother to Mark's—on The Mindy Project.) They are both, I am reliably told, eminently crushworthy. Within a certain population, “Jay or Mark?” is the indie-cinema equivalent of picking the hunkiest Twilight vampire. (Not long ago, my wife awoke from a deep slumber with the realization that she had switched sides.)

The films underperformed in theaters but enjoyed a lucrative afterlife on the small screen.

Mark and Jay grew up in Metairie, an anodyne suburb of New Orleans. They started making movies on their dad's Panasonic when they were 6 and 9, respectively, shooting renditions of The Lone Ranger and the Sermon on the Mount. Looking back on this early period—which extended through adolescence—the brothers recall a spirit of loose-limbed experimentation, speaking with fondness for an improvised monologue about train hopping, “overly serious mood pieces,” and an impression-heavy satire of the extended Duplass family, which “was a big hit at Christmas.”

Things got more serious once Jay realized, after four years as a psychology major at the University of Texas at Austin, that he had no interest in continuing in the field. He stayed in school an extra year to study film, enlisting his brother, who had also enrolled there, to act in his student projects—mostly overly cutesy bits of precious absurdity, inspired by the Duplasses' obsession with the Coen brothers. (“We were trying to be them,” Mark says. “It was not going good.”) In 1996 Jay started an editing business wherein he and Mark charged $5 an hour to cut the movies of the Linklater spawn who were popping up all over Austin.

Eventually Jay got a lucrative commission to shoot a documentary about gardening, a bit of sponsored content on behalf of a briefly deep-pocketed Austin startup called Gardening.com. The company folded before the film was finished but not before paying for it, and that gave the brothers the money to buy a Canon GL1, hire a camera operator and a director of photography, and start work on their second scripted feature, a Rocky-in-running-shoes rip-off called Vince Del Rio.

Before the brothers had finished editing it, they decided it was unreleasable. Mark has publicly referred to the result as “a pile of steaming elephant dung,” a “a steaming pile of dog diarrhea,” and a “well-polished turd.”

“The process got mechanized, and we made a boring-ass movie,” Jay says. Mark adds, “We didn't trust our caveman approach—that our lack of knowledge is an extreme asset for creating a look and feel. It would be like if Kurt Cobain got music lessons and learned how to play a very clean Stratocaster.”

The failure left the Duplasses with no money, no prospects, and a harrowing lack of faith in their filmmaking abilities. In desperation, Mark decided that they were going to make a movie the way they used to as kids—fast and cheap and off-the-cuff. What was an idea for a small film they could make that afternoon? Jay recounted a recent near breakdown he'd had while trying to record the outgoing message on his answering machine. Mark ran out, bought a $3 MiniDV tape—an outlay that represents the movie's entire production cost—and improvised the entirety of what would become 2003's This Is John. In the seven-minute short, what begins as a casual exercise ends up provoking a psychological collapse, as John rejects his various attempts as overly formal or self-conscious. The film ends with John committing to one final attempt at the outgoing message, which proves to be a display of burn-it-all-down self-acceptance that concludes, “Have a great fucking day.” It's a trajectory that succinctly recapitulated the Duplasses' creative journey up to that point.

This Is John may have looked and sounded like a home movie, but it had a rude life to it, and when the Duplasses submitted it to Sundance, it was accepted into the shorts program, where it was hailed as one of the five short films to see.

Two years later the brothers returned to Sundance with The Puffy Chair. Another largely improvised endeavor that drew on their personal lives, The Puffy Chair starred Mark as a narcissistic, struggling music promoter trying to decide whether to marry his needy girlfriend, played by Mark's real-life girlfriend at the time, Katie Aselton. “We were at an interesting point in our relationship—it was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time,” Aselton says. In the film, the two characters get off the pot, while in real life, Mark and Katie shat (they are now married)—in part, Aselton says, because of the therapeutic effects of playacting their breakup. “I was pulling on the worst parts of me and my friends and everything I didn't want to be but maybe sort of was,” she says. “It was a cathartic experience, and I came out the other side saying, ‘Glad I got that out, because I never want to say that in real life.’ ”

To some festivalgoers, the resulting film went beyond relatable to eerily familiar. “There were probably three sentences of dialog that I had said, verbatim, in my own life,” says actor Josh Leonard, who befriended the Duplasses after seeing The Puffy Chair at a film festival in Woodstock. “It was this sense of ‘Fuck you guys for knowing me so well—and I have to meet you.’ ”

Making something so spectacular for such little money sent a shockwave through the industry, says Ross Partridge, who met Mark and Aselton at the Nantucket Film Festival: “It seemed like anybody could make a movie.”

Traditional distributors stayed away from the rough-hewn picaresque, but after the film spent a year on the festival circuit, Red Envelope Entertainment, Netflix's nascent film-distribution arm, made it its first acquisition. The company partnered with Roadside Attractions on a limited theatrical release, but Netflix's Sarandos, who at the time ran Red Envelope, says he was mostly drawn to the film for its home-viewing potential. “One thing I was immediately attracted to is there is no preciousness about distribution with them,” he says. “They want people to see their movies, and they are willing to break glass to get people to see them.”

By the time the Duplasses made their follow-up feature, 2008's Baghead—a light horror about a quartet of struggling filmmakers who retreat to the woods for a weekend in a last-ditch effort to write a feature movie that will jump-start their careers—they had found their sweet spot: rigorously plotted, almost clichéd stories that gave the improvising actors a framework to explore the finest nuances of human interaction. (The tensest scene in Baghead is not when the four leads are chased by the eponymous homicidal maniac but when one character begs his more handsome friend not to sleep with a woman he likes.) The Duplasses were lumped together with directors like Andrew Bujaski and Joe Swanberg as part of a new movement, dubbed mumblecore. Not everyone was charmed. “The modestly named ‘mumblecore’ movement is not an earthquake like the French New Wave, more of a trembling in the shrubbery,” Roger Ebert wrote in his Baghead review.

Nevertheless, the boys had momentum, and they soon had the opportunity to take the traditional next step in a burgeoning directing career—making their first studio film. They cast Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, and John C. Reilly—all Puffy Chair fans willing to work for cheap—in the Fox Searchlight-produced Cyrus. By most standards Cyrus, with a budget of $7 million and a creepy mother-son relationship at its core, would be considered fairly outré box-office fare, but to the Duplasses, the whole experience smacked of typical studio micromanagement. The brothers spent three years working on the film, a lifetime by Duplass standards.

“This is a movie about a very depressed man in his forties,” Mark says. That proved to be an issue for Fox Searchlight, which was wary of alienating audiences. “If his apartment looks too dumpy or he looks too much like shit, they're going to lose money. They wanted him to be down but not too down. There was a heated discussion about throw pillows; that's all I'm going to say.” The film eventually grossed $7.4 million—by far the most successful Duplass venture to date—but if you look back up at the budget in the previous paragraph, you'll see why this was considered a financial disappointment. The same was true of their next studio project, 2011's Jeff, Who Lives at Home, which was a more freewheeling filmmaking experience but not any more successful, bringing in $4.2 million. “It broke our hearts,” Mark says now.

It began to seem clear that the kind of movies the brothers liked to make were inherently limited in their box-office appeal—and that the traditional studio model wasn't ever going to be a good fit. The brothers had been attached to a Scott Rudin-produced revamp of Same Time, Next Year, but the project stalled out. “We wanted to get two movie stars, pay them half a million apiece, and make the movie for $2 million,” Mark says. “Worst-case scenario, it makes $10 million and we're a huge success. And they were just like, ‘That's not our business.’ ”

Yet, while their films underperformed in theaters, many of them were enjoying a modestly lucrative afterlife on the small screen—a fact that heralded the sustainability of an alternative business model. The Duplasses had been flirting with HBO since The Puffy Chair, and this seemed like a good time to get serious. Jay had an idea for a series starring Steve Zissis, who had been a year ahead of Mark in high school and whose acting career had stalled out after his starring roles in Baghead and Do-Deca-Pentathlon. Together, they came up with an idea for Alexander the Great, a pilot about a struggling actor with mental-health issues. “We went to HBO and they said, ‘We love it, but can you make it a relationship show with more characters?’ ” Zissis says. “We were like, ‘Yeah! We can do that!’ Meanwhile, we were shitting ourselves.” (You'll notice that excrement is a recurring theme with these guys.) They returned with an exploration of the various midlife crises—marital, professional, financial, creative—that they and their friends were experiencing.

HBO green-lit the series and never pressured the brothers to broaden its appeal. “We're a subscriber service, so we try to give interesting options to people that they aren't getting elsewhere,” says Casey Bloys, executive vice president of programming at HBO, which in January renewed Togetherness for a second season. “We don't worry if a show is too small or too big.”

While the brothers are still happy making movies, they've found increasing success in helping other people make their own. Brent Humphreys

Last year, Hannah Fidell got a text message from Mark Duplass, asking if she was free to talk. Mark and Jay became fans after Fidell sent them her 2013 feature, A Teacher, before its Sundance premiere. So when Mark had a movie idea for a young-adult reboot of Days of Wine and Roses, with physical abuse instead of alcohol, he wanted her to make it. He could offer her a modest budget, producers, and casting help. He would also promise her complete artistic freedom and protection from any studio influence. Fidell accepted, and by the end of the day she was officially signed up to write and direct what would become 6 Years. At SXSW in March, Netflix purchased it.

You hear these kinds of stories a lot when you start hanging around the Duplasses. J. Davis was working as an editor of corporate videos when he met Jay at a video store; they struck up a friendship, and Jay eventually encouraged him to make a movie about his obsession with Charles Manson. Jay ended up starring in the film as well as participating in a Kickstarter campaign to fund it, and Manson Family Vacation joined 6 Years at SXSW, where it too was purchased by Netflix. The girlfriend of aspiring writer-director Patrick Brice was working as Mark and Katie's nanny while Brice was at Cal Arts; Mark helped him with his thesis film, acted in and produced his first feature, Creep, and produced and helped cast Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling, and Jason Schwartzman in The Overnight. Liz Flahive and Jeff Cox, a married couple who wrote the Duplass-produced Adult Beginners, were offered Mark and Katie's house as a workspace. “I got a group email from him,” Flahive says, “which said something like, ‘Katie and I have a house we're not using right now because we're working, so if you want to use our house to write or incubate a project or you need to crash and not pay rent for a while and work on your album …’ I was like, holy shit, this guy means it!”

It is perhaps the most surprising development in an already surprising career; beyond making their own movies and TV shows, the Duplasses have graduated to micromoguldom, helping likeminded filmmakers benefit from the business model they've developed. In 2008 they got a call from their friend Bryan Poyser, who was trying to scrape together $5,000 to finish a film. “He said, ‘My movie dies tomorrow without this money,’ ” Jay remembers. The brothers had just received payment for the Cyrus screenplay, so they handed some of it over to Poyser and pitched in some editing help, which got them an executive producer credit. Their involvement also got the attention of the Sundance jury, which accepted the film into competition. “With a little bit of money and 15 hours of work, we changed his whole world and that whole film,” Jay says.

As Mark puts it, the revelation that they could rescue a struggling filmmaker's career with just a little bit of time and money “blew up in our heads.” They had always been grateful for their parents' financial and emotional support over the years, and they saw this as a way to pay it forward. It also tapped into a lingering sense of survivor's guilt—an appreciation that their careers barely recovered from the Vince Del Rio disaster, and a desire to save others from suffering a similar fate. Since helping Poyser, they have produced multiple films a year (with at least four in 2015), all adhering to the philosophy of keeping costs down, protecting the filmmaker's vision, and getting the movie in front of audiences as quickly as possible.

“Mark and Jay are amazing,” says Nick Kroll, who costars with Mark in The League and who conceived and starred in Adult Beginners. “We made our movie and then sold it, and now it's coming out! Just like it's supposed to happen but so rarely does.”

That process should be even smoother now that Netflix has signed a four-picture deal with Duplass Brothers Productions, formalizing what was already beginning to feel like an unofficial pipeline. “There are tons of inefficiencies in independent film distribution,” Sarandos says. “By the time something gets to Netflix, it's already several million dollars in the hole. So we said, ‘Why don't you skip that process, come right to Netflix, and make money on every film you make?’ ”

Now the Duplasses are taking a similar approach to television. Last year they met with a couple of filmmakers who were trying to make a pilot for an animated series called Animals. “We said, ‘Don't do it,’ ” Mark says. “If you're lucky, you'll sell it. If you're even luckier, you'll make a pilot, and then it won't get picked up and you'll have wasted two and a half years. We can't pay you very much, but we'll pay you enough to live and make all 10 episodes of your show, and then we'll go out and sell it later.” HBO ended up not only buying those 10 episodes but also signing on for a second season at the same time. Four months later the network signed the brothers to a two-year development deal.

On one hand, the Duplasses seem to have attained filmmaking nirvana: the ability to turn any idea, no matter how fleeting, into a profitable movie or TV show. “If we have an idea in the car on Friday at 9 am, and this is not hyperbole, by 3 that day I can have a writer, a cast, a producer, and be in preproduction,” Mark says. “Because we have the money to finance it, and we know all the people who want to do it.”

But if your tastes run to cautionary fables—or if your parents ever forced you to huff down a cartonful of cigarettes after catching you smoking—then you'll recognize the precariousness of the Duplasses' current situation. For a team that has thrived within strict limits, the absence of traditional career obstacles can be perilous.

First and foremost is the very real danger that the Duplasses will simply work themselves to death. When Mark was in his late teens and early twenties, he had a flourishing career as a singer-songwriter, but he had to give it up when he developed tendinitis. (For a time he led another band, in which he played a special low-impact keyboard.) “I played acoustic guitar so intensely, for so long—for nine hours a day as a 10-year-old, writing songs through the night, on tour constantly from when I was 19—that I destroyed my arms and shoulders in the process,” Mark says. The pain—bad enough that Mark had to ask other people to open doors for him—lasted for about five years, through the shooting and screening of The Puffy Chair and all the attention and opportunity that followed. “It was the height of my tenacity and the height of my working hard, and basically I had a mini nervous breakdown and it all just kind of came out of me,” Mark says. “I was in a state of literally on-the-floor anxiety and depression for two months.” The relentless workaholism led Mark to confront his deep-seated depression, which he manages today. He stabilized, with the help of his wife and therapy and some antidepressants, but he tells me that he is constantly worried that he'll slip back into that frenzy. “That's why I've conscripted the people around me to watch out for me,” he says. “Left to my own devices and all my own work instincts, I'd just destroy myself.”

Already there are troubling signs. When Jay arrived at the Chateau Marmont, he complained that his grueling schedule had begun to take a physical toll. “Mark's had a lot of body pain in the past, and I'm going through it right now,” he said. “I have all this shoulder and neck tension, which is pretty much the majority of my world right now.” (Pushing oneself to the point of bodily failure is something of a Duplassian leitmotif. Both Do-Deca-Pentathlon and Togetherness feature scenes of grown men exerting themselves until they vomit.)

At the same time, it's difficult to give any of this up after they've worked for so long to get here. “We went to Catholic prep school, and everyone we graduated with was rich and successful by the time they were 25,” Jay says. “We were extremely not-rich and extremely not-successful, even at 30. And we felt like, OK, we've chosen this unconventional path, we've tortured ourselves and our parents—if we let up and we don't succeed, then we're to blame.” It's been hard to switch gears, to go from by-any-means-necessary to leave-a-message-with-my-people-and-we'll-see-what-we-can-do. “We hit a point in our midthirties where there was so much stuff coming at us that we could eliminate all the dumb stuff,” Jay continues. “Now we're in a weird position, where eliminating the dumb stuff is easy—now we have to eliminate the really cool things.”

Mark, sitting next to him at the Chateau Marmont, nods vigorously. It's a problem he's intimately familiar with. “How do you say no to doughnuts?” he asks.

The Making of the Moguls

Over the years, Mark and Jay Duplass have worn about every hat there is to wear in the movie industry. Here's how they built their empire.—JORDAN CRUCCHIOLA

1996

Connect 5

Mark: Producer | Actor

Jay: Producer | Actor

2003

This Is John

Mark: Producer | Writer | Actor

Jay: Director | Cinematographer

2005

The Puffy Chair

Mark: Producer | Director | Writer | Actor

Jay: Producer | Director | Writer

2007

Hannah Takes the Stairs

Mark: Writer | Actor

2008

Baghead

Mark: Producer | Director | Writer

Jay: Producer | Director | Writer | Cinematographer

Nights and Weekends

Jay: Actor

2009

Other People's Parties

Mark: Actor

Humpday

Mark: Actor

True Adolescents

Mark: Actor

The League (FX)

Mark: Actor

2010

Greenberg

Mark: Actor

Mars

Mark: Actor

Lovers of Hate

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

Bass Ackwards

Mark: Producer

The Freebie

Mark: Producer

Cyrus

Mark: Director | Writer

Jay: Director | Writer

2011

Kevin

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer | Director | Writer | Cinematographer

Your Sister's Sister

Mark: Producer | Actor

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Mark: Director | Writer

Jay: Director | Writer

Slacker 2011

Jay: Director | Actor

2012

Black Rock

Mark: Producer | Writer

Jay: Producer

Safety Not Guaranteed

Mark: Producer | Actor

Jay: Producer

Darling Companion

Mark: Actor

People Like Us

Mark: Actor

Zero Dark Thirty

Mark: Actor

The Do-Deca-Pentathlon

Mark: Producer | Director | Writer

Jay: Producer | Director | Writer

The Mindy Project (FOX)

Mark: Actor

Jay: Actor

2013

Maron (IFC)

Mark: Actor

Bad Milo!

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

Parkland

Mark: Actor

2014

The One I Love

Mark: Producer | Actor

Jay: Producer

The Skeleton Twins

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

Adult Beginners

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

Creep

Mark: Producer | Writer | Actor

Wedlock

Mark: Producer | Actor

Jay: Producer

Transparent (Amazon Studios)

Jay: Actor

Tammy

Mark: Actor

Mercy

Mark: Actor

2015

January 23: Duplass Brothers Productions signs a four-picture deal with Netflix after Sundance.

Togetherness (HBO)

Mark: Producer | Director | Writer | Actor

Jay: Producer | Director | Writer

The Lazarus Effect

Mark: Actor

The Bronze

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

Tangerine

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

Manson Family Vacation

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer | Actor

6 Years

Mark: Producer

Jay: Producer

The Overnight

Mark: Producer

–>

Editor at large Jason Tanz (@jasontanz) wrote about the trust economy in issue 22.05.